We’re going to get into all of that in this, right here, right now.

Niche? Ok. Really, what is a niche?

Niche is just a fancy word for segmenting your market and getting clarity on who your audience truly is.  Target market is another way of explaining the same concept.  We will use both names interchangeably in this post.

Your niche, your target market isn’t something to be confused with an elevator pitch. Your niche market is not something that’s easily explained in a single sentence. It’s a profile of who your audience is, and I really mean WHO they are… What do they think about? What keeps them up at night? What do they believe? What are they striving for?

“Okay, great! I am a financial planner targeting entrepreneurs.”

Nope, you’re not – you’re a financial planner without focus. Drill that puppy down!

When you see the big fish in your industry crushing it, it’s so damn tempting to go after them and aim for a broad market when positioning yourself.  But, you have to sneak up on it, you have to start with a narrow focus and slowly expand to the broader market, organically.

That’s how all the big brands got started and that’s how you will do.

What’s the big deal?

The number one thing that is essential to your success in business is finding a niche market to serve.  Without having clarity on your target market, your products, services, and marketing messaging will not drive the results it should because it won’t resonate with people.  You have no idea where to invest marketing dollars because there’s no way to identify where you can get in front of your target customers to generate a return on your marketing investment.

If you’ve spent money on marketing in the past and “it didn’t work” you either didn’t have your messaging honed in to resonate with your target market, or you didn’t get your message in front of the right people… or both! <– That really doesn’t work.

Identifying your niche is everything when it comes to creating a digital product.

How to identify your niche market?

The most important thing when identifying a niche market is to identify the market that has a need for what you have to offer, knows they have that need, and is willing to spend money on a solution for that need.  It’s the trifecta of the perfect niche market.  Too many people spend all their time and money attempting sell to a market that needs their product, but has no idea they need it and, as a result, aren’t willing to spend money solving a problem they don’t know they have.

Our Course Accelerator process will guide you through something we call the 10×30 Method that will help you identify your niche.

Here’s some questions to get your started:

• Who can benefit from your expertise/product?
• Who is most likely to buy your product or service?
• Why type of people do you enjoy working with?
• Who is your ideal client?

How understand your niche?

Identifying and understanding your target market are two different things. Getting to know and understand your target market is an ongoing process.  It’s something that huge companies spend tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars every year to keep their finger on the pulse of their customer market.

Obviously we don’t have the luxury of a Coca-cola marketing budget, but we do have one advantage.

Personal touch.

Usually we can’t out-spend the big fish in our industries, but we can out serve.

Here are some questions that will give you a good jump start:

• What are their short term goals? (1-5 years)
• What are their long term aspirations? (5-10+ years)
• What are their short term challenges?
• What are their long term pain points?
• What are their fears?

If you’re not yet signed up for our Course Accelerator training, we’d love to help you create a digital product that actually sells like hotcakes and gets you more time with your family, gets you on more airplanes to see the world, and gets you more money to stash away.

Click here for more information on Course Accelerator.

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1. AFFILIATIONS AND ASSOCIATIONS

A simple way to generate some credibility for you or your company is to join national and international associations that are relevant to your industry. It’s important to join associations that either are reputable or, at least, sound credible. Affiliating yourself with an association gives your personal brand or your business a sense of professionalism and credibility.

Another way to gain credibility quickly is to land a speaking engagement at a major corporation or university. Even if you offer to speak for free, being able to say that you’ve spoken at ‘X’ University and ‘Y’ Corporation is a big deal. Associating your company with more recognized brands is a great way to build up the credibility of your brand.

The last type of associations that are proven to establish credibility fast, are partnerships. If it makes sense for your product or service, partnering with well-known local businesses and non-profits can not only make your business more credible but it can also extend your reach.

What are some associations you can join? What well-known establishments might you be able to speak at? And, who might you be able to partner with?

2. SHARE YOUR KNOWLEDGE

Publishing content that shows potential customers or clients that you understand their problems and can show them how to solve them, you build credibility.

Education, training and sharing information is the new age of marketing. Too often I find myself talking with business owners or entrepreneurs that work hard to hold on to their information instead of openly sharing it. With virtually endless information a few mouse-clicks away, it’s really not serving you to keep all your information to yourself and only sharing it with your clients. You would have a much more successful business if you openly shared your information.

Openly sharing information does two things. It shows people that you really know what you are talking about, that you are a knowledgeable expert, and it show that you care about helping people.

Who would you rather do business with? The person that says they are the expert and seems like they only care about their agenda, or the person that shows you they are the expert and seems like they care about you and your end result of using their product or service?

3. ACCELERATE A POSITIVE REPUTATION

Reputation is everything in business. We’ve all heard the saying, “It takes a long time to build a great reputation and only a moment to ruin it.” As we become more and more connected by technology, a great reputation is becoming even more and more important because bad news travels really, really fast.

A couple ways to boost your reputation quickly is to develop case studies around your product or service. Especially if you are starting a new business, it can be hard to get your first clients and customers because you don’t have a track record. Donate or discount your products or services in order to get your first couple case study clients. Once you have a couple case studies, getting new customers or clients is a lot easier because you are able to back up your talk with proof.

Another great way to build trust and a good reputation is 3rd party validation and referrals. In business, if you’re talking about your products and services, then what you are saying might be true; however, if someone else is talking about your products and services, then it must be true. Having client testimonials or publicity equals immediate credibility.

What would be a great case study for you? What could you do to get some client/customer testimonials? What types of publications would give your brand reputation a boost?

I hope the information in this post was useful and helped you discover some new ways that you can establish credibility fast in your industry.

If you found this information helpful, feel free to share with friends via Facebook, Twitter, or Email.

The post How to Quickly Establish Credibility In A New Market appeared first on Course Accelerator.

When most people first think of creating an irresistible offer, the natural tendency is to think about drastically discounting your product or service.  It’s probably because thats they type of marketing we are most frequently exposed to.

When you think “great deals”, what is the ONE day, out of the entire year, that comes to mind?

Yes, exactly Black Friday.

So, since discounting is how most marketing and advertising is done, it makes perfect sense that discounting is the first place our minds go.

That being said, “sale-oriented marketing” and an “irresistible offer” are not the same.

Significantly discounting your product can be one way component of an irresistible offer, but discounting alone often isn’t a way to create a true irresistible offer.

Yes, it’s true, people love saving money, but more importantly, people are looking to get the most value for their dollar.

It’s important to keep that in mind when creating an irresistible offer for your product or service.

“An irresistible offer is about making the customer feel like they are getting maximum value for their dollar.”

How to Create an Irresistible Offer

There are many different strategies and methods to creating an irresistible offer.

Your irresistible offer should communicate the value of your product or service so clearly that anyone considering to purchase believes the ROI will far surpass the investment.

You’ll know you have an irresistible offer when people say something along the lines of, “Wow, only an idiot would pass that up!”.

The most effective irresistible offers are the ones that leverage multiple strategies.  This is often called stacking an offer.  A simplified version of an irresistible offer is a good deal stacked on top of another good deal.

Here are a few of those strategies and methods:

• Bundling & Value-Adds
• Attention Grabbing Risk-reversal
• Discount correctly

Let’s dive into each of these topics a little deeper.

Bundle Your Products

Creating bundles of your products is a great way to increase the value of your offer and make more sales.

Remember, people are looking to get more value for their dollar.  If a customer can, for example, get five products for the price of three, this can be an irresistible offer.

For example, cell phone companies like Verizon and AT&T do this with new cell phone sales. For only ~$50 more, you can get a car charger, protective phone case, and a package of three screen protectors. The phone case alone is $40, so people run the logic in their mind, and think “well, only an idiot wouldn’t take advantage of THAT deal,” and they pull their credit card.

Phone companies use the bundling concept for an up-sell, but you can use it for your core product offering as well.

Do you have multiple products or services that you can bundle?

Create a handful of offers that you believe would make your customers say to themselves (or out loud), “Wow, you’d have to be an idiot not to buy this right now!” and run them by a few of your loyal customers to get their feedback.

Create a Value-Add

Depending on what type of business you have, and goals you are wanting to achieve, there are certain financial metrics that cary more weight than others.  The value-add offer model is a great way to continue to charge full price, but you sweeten your normal offer by throwing something in with the sale.

Value-adds are exactly like bundle pricing.  The difference with value-adds is that your customers get a secondary product or service that increases the real, or perceived, value of the product they are purchasing, at no extra cost.

For example, if I sell toothpaste, I could throw in a tooth brush with the purchase of a full-price purchase of a tube of toothpaste. The toothbrush makes the toothpaste more valuable.

If you can get creative, there are quite a few ways to add value without having to spend a lot of money or cut into your profit margins.

Brendon Burchard’s latest book launch for his new book The Motivation Manifesto debuted at #1 Barnes & Noble and spent multiple consecutive weeks on the NY Times Bestsellers list, largely because he created a value-add offer with the sale of his book. When you purchased a copy of The Motivation Manifesto, you also received access to a 12-week online training program, that was based on the concepts in the book and valued at $297, for free!

This is a perfect example of adding substantial value without affecting your profit margins because the cost of delivering the online course is virtually the same whether he gives the course away to 100 people or 100,000 people.

What is something that you can throw in with your product to increase the value of a sale without destroying your profit margins?

Risk-Reversal

The goal with a risk-reversal is to take as much risk as possible off of the customer’s shoulders.  When you reduce risk, you remove friction from the buying process, and increase the number of sales you make.

There are actually several ways that you can take away the majority, if not all the risk so reassure people that they have the opportunity to confirm that their purchase was a quality decision.

Money-Back Guarantee

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re familiar with money-back guarantees.  The key here is to make your money-back guarantee stand out.

Instead of giving the typical 30-day money-back guarantee. Give your customers a 365-day money-back guarantee.

If you have rock-solid confidence in your product or service, give a 90-day double your money-back guarantee.  If a customer isn’t satisfied with their purchase you’ll give them double the money they paid.

Wow, talk about a risk reversal!

Results In Advance

This concept is usually based on the honor system.

“Pay a percentage now and send us the rest if you get results we promise.”

I’ve seen Ryan Deiss implement this concept with his live event, Traffic & Conversion summit.  The total price of a ticket to the conference is $1,400 but you only have to pay $700 in order to attend and if you don’t make at least $5,000 within 90 days of the event with what you learn at the event, you don’t have to pay the remaining $700.

I’ve also seen some internet marketers use this concept to enroll students into their high-end coaching programs.  For example: A year-long program has a price tag of $15k but you only have to pay $10k up front.  If you don’t get the results you want, you don’t have to pay the difference.

Warranty

This is a pretty common concept, but again, make your warranty stand out.

Put a rock solid warranty on your product to remove any doubt in a customer’s mind that they are purchasing a quality product. Warranty’s typically only make sense for physical products but they can also be applied to software products too.

“Our products have a lifetime warranty.  If anything breaks… we’ll fix it or send you a new one for free.”

Payment Plans

Payment plans are a great way to reduce risk.  I hesitated to include this here because it’s not really a reversal of risk, but it does have an impact on the level of risk a consumer has to endure.

Payment plans, allow your customer to get all or most of the benefits of your product today while minimizing the immediate financial risk.

This is a very effective marketing tactic.

Discount your products or services – correctly

While discounting is the go-to when you think of a sales promotion, it’s not the only option and often isn’t the best option, either.

In the first chapter of the book Influence, Robert Cialdini tells a story of a small business owner who wrote a note to his manager to cut the price of their product in half because it wasn’t selling. The manager misread the note and ended up doubling the price instead and the product flew off the shelves.

The principle at play here is perceived value.

People have a value association with the price of a product, therefore, discounting your product may not generate enough sales volume to offset loss in profit from selling your product at full price.

Here are some concepts that make discounting more powerful.

• Exclusivity
• Urgency
• Loss Leader

Below I’ll share some ways that you can incorporate those concepts into your irresistible offer.

Segmented offers

A great way to create exclusivity is to create segmented offers.

You can segment your offers by channel. For example, you could have a specific offer just for Facebook.

Or you can segment your offers to your database based on purchase history.

If you have an advanced CRM & email marketing tool like Infusionsoft, this should be a super easy concept to implement.

If you’re using a basic email marketing tool like iContact, Aweber, Constant Contact or Mailchimp, it may be a little more difficult.

Put simply, you’d create an amazing offer that is only available to people who have purchased your most expensive product or service and market that offer only to those people.  This is powerful because you can tailor your messaging to that specific group and they feel like they are apart of the family.

You can also create different offers for people who have purchased any of your product vs. people who are just subscribers to your newsletter.

Early Bird Discount

The epitome of an early bird discount is the Black Friday “door buster”.  People start to line up hours, even days in advance to be one of the first 100 people to get a flat screen TV for $300.

Although it’s fun to joke about people going crazy for more material things the day after Thanksgiving, their behavior goes to show that these types of promotions are very effective because the offer has very strong exclusivity and urgency components.  It’s exclusive because only 100 people will get that price, and it’s urgent because it’s only available to the first 100 people.

According to Twitter, 62 percent of shoppers Tweet about purchases they’ve made. (Link to source)

Rewarding the early customers with an added bonus, on top of the offer they are already expecting, is a great way to jumpstart and maximize the word-of-mouth marketing that will evolve from your irresistible offer.

Limited-Time Offer

A discount becomes a limited-time offer when you put a deadline on it.

Instead of just marking down your product and putting it on sale, create a limited-time offer.

Give Your Product Away For Free

Giving your product away for free, or a free trial period only makes sense if you know that your average customer will come back multiple times per month or per year.

This is what’s called a loss leader.

“Get the first one free”

You get them to try your product for free because you know that a certain percentage will come back and buy your products or services.

Wrapping up

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, your irresistible offer will be most effective when you take several of these concepts and stack them into a single offer.

The post How to Create an Irresistible Offer that Increases Sales appeared first on Course Accelerator.

The key to avoiding this situation is what we call a Micro-Launch.

What is a Micro-Launch?

A Micro-Launch is the step before you create your course and it’s the fastest way to generate revenue quickly.

At it’s core, a Micro-Launch is a focus group that helps you work out all the kinks in your product before you launch your product.

Micro-Launches are typically only includes a small, exclusive group of people; typically 25-100 people depending on the size and stage of your business.  Micro-Launches are usually conducted live, over the phone, via webinar or webcast.  It’s common to charge anywhere between $37 to $197 for people to participate in a Micro-Launch.  They are essentially getting everything you teach in your online course directly from you, live, for a fraction of the cost of the online program that they are ultimately helping you create.

We’ve put together a free 30-day training on the Micro-Launch concept, if you want a deep dive into how to implement a Micro-Launch, click here to register for Course Accelerator.

What is the purpose of a Micro-Launch?

The main purpose of a Micro-Launch is to gather feedback and testimonials from the small group of people who are involved in the Micro-Launch from the customer side.  The feedback you get from the Micro-Launch will be invaluable information and it will help you refine and put the polish on your product.

There are several benefits to executing Micro-Launch.  On one hand, it’s an opportunity to practice teaching and training in order to discover any sticking points or areas of the training that need more attention.  Sometimes the gaps in your course content can’t be seen until the information is being consumed by your customers.

A Micro-Launch allows you to fill in the gaps and iron out the bumps in your content without risking your reputation, losing sales, ruining affiliate relationships, etc.

Another great benefit to a Micro-Launch is that it can give you a jump-start on building your email list.  The more hype you create around your Micro-Launch the more growth you will see in your list.  Keep in mind that there’s nothing wrong with keeping your Micro-Launch on the down-low, but if you already have a large database, you can use a Micro-Launch to test your funnel and product with a specific segment of your list.

How is a Micro-Launch different from a Product Launch.

The Micro-Launch is used to help get the product ready for the actual Product launch. The Product Launch is the big event that takes place once the product is ready to be made available to the masses.

A Micro-Launch is the equivalent to a focus group for a new household product, a pilot show for a new TV series, or a Beta release of a new software product.

These concepts aren’t new in the business world, but for some reason they haven’t transferred over to the online marketing space. An online course is not a one-and-done type of thing. It’s an iterative process. When creating your online course you want to create the opportunity for you to make those iterative improvements. You want to fail small, fail quickly and make constant improvements to your content; a Micro-launch allows you to do all of those things!

If you’re interested in a deep dive into how to conduct a Micro-Launch, we’ve put together a free 30-day training called Course Accelerator that walks you step-by-step through the entire process and gives you scripts, checklists, worksheets and tools that you’ll need to create your course the right way and get paid while you do it!

Click here for more information on our Course Accelerator training.

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